As many of you know, I am a member of Story Sessions, an online community of creatives (who I am totally in love with). Throughout the year, SS offers Collectives--smaller, focused groups (think: workshop) that run for 40 days. This time around, I am joining up with Jamie Bagley for 40 Days of Blogging and following her prompts. Just fair warning: to maintain my own sanity, I am writing these "5 Minute Friday" style, meaning... I'm setting a time limit and writing without editing. The process doesn't make for the best writing, but it's just about the only way I'll follow through with 40 straight days of posting.

Writing helps me connect...

It happens while I drive, as I stand in line at the grocery store and the moment I lay down at night. It happens in the shower, during church, in the middle of a conversation with a friend. Ideas. Random sentences. Dreams. Story lines. Blog topics. They pop in and bounce around and sometimes stick. Usually, they hang around just long enough for me to assure myself I'll remember them and then slip quietly out, settling somewhere in the graveyard of good intentions failed by no follow-through.But when I take the time to sit down, pen in hand and paper sprawled out over a Starbucks table or my own desk or the living room floor, the noise in my head quiets and my pulse slows. It may take a few stop-and-starts, paragraphs crossed out and paces around the kitchen, but eventually, the words connect with each other and the clanging around of jagged pieces of story and first lines find each other on the page. A spark! and then the pouring out. I can see it as I look back through old journals and posts, how the whole process is-has always been-more than hobby or habit. It is the working out what is being worked within, the only way I know to connect my head with my heart and my heart with the whispering of the Spirit. Apart from the written word, my mind is just a twisted up mess of half-processed curiosities. Writing waters the shallow roots and they grow deep, deep, deeper still until finally, something blooms up out of the dirt.

I love that line, "It is the working out what is being worked within"...That is GOOD stuff right there. I think I'm going to have to write that out and put it above my computer. And knowing it came from you will make me smile even more :)

I love your last line! ". Writing waters the shallow roots and they grow deep, deep, deeper still until finally, something blooms up out of the dirt." And I love the idea of setting a timer. My posts end up taking me a long time because of all the thinking I do while writing. LOL Maybe I should try your idea sometime.